Percival Everett, 65, is the author of 21 novels, including Glyph, a satire on literary theory, Telephone, which was published simultaneously in three different versions, and Erasure, about a black author who, angered by expectations of what African American fiction ought to look like, adopts a pseudonym to write a parodically gritty (and wildly successful) novel called My Pafology. The New Yorker has called Everett “cool, analytic and resolutely idiosyncratic… he excels at the unblinking execution of extraordinary conceits”. His new book, The Trees, is a twisted detective novel centred on a spate of grisly, seemingly supernatural murders of white people in modern-day Mississippi. He spoke from Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California.
What led you to write a novel about lynching?
I completed the manuscript right before Covid started – I’d been working on it for a year – but it was something that had been on my mind all the time. The kernel of it was a song: Lyle Lovett, the country singer, covered the traditional song Ain’t No More Cane and coupled it with another song called Rise Up. I was listening to it before I played tennis one morning and I thought, huh, there’s my novel: what if everyone did “rise up”? It became a kind of a zombie idea, but I don’t like zombies so it morphed into what it became. While I very seldom say what any of my novels mean, one thing I think is true is that there’s a distinction to be made between morality and justice: justice might not always feel moral to us, and that’s a scary thought.
